Upper East Side

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Astoria: What happened here food-wise in 2007? Wine bars and the bloggers’ favorite new restaurant, Il Bambino. [Joey in Astoria]Bedford-Stuyvesant: The Rustik Tavern opens on DeKalb this afternoon; look for a full menu soon. Points for quoting Hemingway on the menu. [BedStuy Blog]Fort Greene: The proposed food co-op starts a blog. One step closer to reality! [Brownstoner]Midwood: Shawarma has come, at long last, to America's first kosher Subway. [Grub Street]Upper East Side: There are over 200 restaurants here, so don’t dine in the same place more than once. [Upper East Side Informer]West Village: Josh DeChellis is doing a late-breaking party at BarFry with composed Japanese dishes and an open bar from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. for $75. Call the restaurant to reserve. [Grub Street]Williamsburg: Long Island’s Bridge Vineyards to open a tasting room and wine bar on Broadway. [11211side]

Self-styled badass chef Tony Bourdain plays 20 Questions, revealing that he lives with his wife and daughter on the Upper East Side these days — “proximity to Baby Gap is a priority” — and has a kitchen that is “small and functional and very crowded with baby food, cat food, a few essentials.” [Chicago Tribune]
Frank Bruni takes a moment to sort through the piles of food-related tomes that landed on his desk this year, finding his favorites to be David Kamp’s The Food Snob’s Dictionary and the recently released Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink. [Diner’s Journal/NYT]
Related: David Kamp Adds Two More Entries to the Food Snob’s Dictionary
A recent NYU grad is suing Times Square club Arena for $2 million over a June incident in which he was overcharged by $1,000, beat up by the bouncer, and arrested for not buying enough alcohol. [NYP]

Brooklyn Heights: The rats here are getting bigger and bolder, and the normally peaceful residents have taken to fighting back with machetes and water hoses. [Brooklyn Paper]
Chelsea: From 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. through Sunday, you can shop for cool old magazines and comics at Time Machine and simultaneously get drunk at their holiday open bar. [Vanishing New York]
Red Hook: A sliver-thin waterfront greenway is going up that will run all the way to Greenpoint. Rad! [OnNYTurf]

Clinton Hill: Some rejoice to find that the rumor of a Starbucks on Myrtle will not become reality. [Clinton Hill Blog]
Long Island City: Vine Wine is discounting cases by 15 percent. [Joey in Astoria]
Murray Hill: Lines are still out the door at the 2nd Avenue Deli. [Eater] Video: Overheard at the 2nd Avenue Deli [Grub Street]
Park Slope: Co-op members are getting frisky on Craigslist. [Eat for Victory/VV]
Upper East Side: At Alice’s Tea Cup, the waitress will give you wings to wear while you sip, if you’re into that sort of thing. [The Upper East Side Scene]
White Plains: BLT Steak just opened at the Ritz-Carlton here, so no need to come to Manhattan for dinner anymore. [Journal News]

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Brooklyn Heights: They'll tear down the landmarked 1936 Purchase Building — a classic, WPA-style structure — as part of the construction of Brooklyn Bridge Park, which may begin next month. [NYDN via Gowanus Lounge]
Fort Greene: All the shabby-chic vendors of choice are lining up for the Brooklyn Flea Market, coming here Sundays starting in April. [Brownstoner]
Governors Island: Plans released today for the isle's redo into a pomo eco-asis reveal that multiethnic children will frolic while seabirds fly overhead at dangerously low altitudes. [Queens Crap]

East Village: Do a piercing salon, tattoo parlor, and bong shop qualify as the "community facilities" a developer said he'd rent to in return for being allowed to build bigger than code here on St. Marks? Discuss. [Neither More Nor Less]
Elmhurst: A skater boy rescued a newborn baby, umbilical cord intact, from a freezing Dumpster. Troubled young moms, New York law says it's okay to abandon babies … as long as you leave them somewhere safe and warm where they can be found! [Newsday]
Flatbush: Locals here called in more noise complaints in the second half of 2007 than in any other Brooklyn hood. So does that make Flatbush the borough's noisiest hood or just full of its noisiest kvetchers? [Ditmas Park Blog via NYDN]

Upper East Side: Malcolm Gladwell revealed his big feet, gesticulated intensely, said people shouldn't be allowed to say where they went to college, and stole bloggery hearts at the 92nd St. Y the other night. [UES Informer]
Bushwick: Now the hipsters are staging Punk Rock Pillow Fights. Will their crazy, ironic, lo-fi fun ever stop? [Brooklyn Rink via the vaguely anti-Semitic BushwickBK]
East Harlem: A principal at a high school here sent teachers a memo telling them to dumb down their standards for the kids. Uh-huh. [NYDN]
Harlem: Amid its massive, seventeen-acre expansion in the hood's west side, Columbia says it won't tear down the Cotton Club on 125th after all. That's Christian of them. [NYP]

Boerum Hill: Parents who shelled out $1,200 for a preschool found that it was full of toxic hazards, running without a license and bouncing teachers' checks since last summer. That's so not the New Brownstone Brooklyn! [Brooklyn Eagle]
Bushwick: In which a bored cop mistakes a narcissistic gay Russian taking pictures of himself for a terrorist. Sounds like the start of a porn vid. [BushwickBK]
Harlem: Will a possible rezoning of 125th Street into towers of luxury condos and chain stores be a good thing for Harlem, or "Katrina-fication done by the swipe of a pen"? [VV]

Astoria: Bar 36 at 36-05 30th Avenue hosts Martini Thursdays, where it’s "$2 off every martini on their menu (or create your own). Can’t beat the free snacks, too!" [Joey in Astoria]
East Village: You’d be hard-pressed find a better, more satisfying "fantastic when it was hot but … made for a mean late night snack as well" deal than bär-bo-ne’s nightly five-course fresh pasta tasting menu. [Gluttoness]
Flatiron: Eisenberg’s has been serving tater tots as latkes, but "the owner talked about getting in some big latkes soon. Let’s hope so … A place like Eisenberg’s deserves to have the best latkes." [Lost City]
Midtown West: Norma’s has added new breakfast items to its menu, including hot chestnut pancakes and a chocolate waffle with peanut-butter-toffee-crunch filling, but don’t expect to get in and try them until the tourist exodus in January. [Eater]
Tribeca: With chef Amanda Freitag at the helm, Jimmy Bradley plans to strive "for a bold, lusty, soulful menu at the Harrison." Saucy! [Restaurant Girl]
Upper East Side: On weekdays through December, Zoë Townhouse at 135 East 62nd Street is offering a 15 percent discount off bottles of wine from noon to 7 p.m. [Grub Street]
Williamsburg: From these pictures, the opening of the Peter Luger annex, which would significantly expand the restaurant, seems imminent. [Eater]

Bay Ridge: With its unsolved crimes and rampant development, is the Ridge what L.A. was like back in the noir-y, true-crime forties and fifties? Seems a little grandiose for us. [Bay Ridge Rover]
Bedford-Stuyvesant: Okay, okay, it's not the richest hood, but couldn't they put up some holiday decorations? [Bed-Stuy Blog]
Ditmas Park: If you want to carol at the tree-lighting next weekend, you'd better know your Christmas and Hanukkah songs, but you'll get extra credit if you can bring the Kwanzaa and solstice beats, too. [Ditmas Park Blog]

Next to the Methadone Clinic: Not only is The View's Sherri Shepherd insisting that Jesus predated the great classical civilizations, she's also looking at buying a condo in a high-rise "next to a methadone clinic." But where? Only that pre-Greco-Roman J.C. guy knows. [Curbed]
Bedford-Stuyvesant: Lots of cute kitties here need a home. If you've already got enough cats, don't look at the cute pictures, or you may end up with more, you big softie. (Or is it that you just can't get along with people?) [Bed-Stuy Blog]
Corona: First there was white flight. Now there's black flight. And when Martians land here, everybody-else flight will ensue. [Junction Boulevard]

Bowery: The first visitors to the New Museum this weekend were given candy, then yelled at for eating it. [Curbed]
Dumbo: A black disabled woman is suing local megadeveloper Dave Walentas for shutting her out of a luxury rental, saying he excluded her based on quibbles like an outstanding cable bill of $1.61. [NYDN]
Greenpoint: He wants her to know that his bedbug scare and her possible case of genital herpes are no reason they shouldn't have a torrid affair. Especially now that he's exterminated his bedroom. [Newyorkshitty]

Cobble Hill: Sahadi’s might have a fancy new sign to flaunt at Trader Joe’s, but are they cutting corners to compete? The Brooklyn Paper reports that customers are "fuming that the grocer has replaced the classic glass jars with generic plastic containers in the nuts, dried fruits and candies section." [Brooklyn Heights Blog]
East Village: Next Friday, Tasty Falafel on St. Marks Place will sell sandwiches for 8 cents each from 4 to 9 p.m. and host a falafel-eating contest at 6. [Gridskipper]
Lower East Side: A new wine bar is on the way, and Gino and Guido are now accepting applications in the TRE space at 173 Ludlow. [Eat for Victory/VV]
Midtown East: Gilt has announced that chef Chris Lee has spent $8,000 on a 1.51-pound white truffle, which is “significantly larger than the truffle that Sirio Maccioni of Le Cirque won in a highly publicized October bidding.” We wonder what GM Elli Jafari thinks about that tougher tuber. [Bottomless Dish/Citysearch]
Upper East Side: Serendipity 3 has pushed back its reopening from tonight to December 5, after being closed by the DOH. [Eater]

You have to love crime coverage in New York. When two preppy ladies are caught going into open-house viewings at ritzy apartments and making off with pursefuls of trinkets, it's not a paragraph in the police blotter. It's a page-four story with the headline: "THELMA & LOUISE BUSTED!" Never mind that in the film Thelma & Louise, the two women drive off a cliff to their doom to avoid getting caught by police (as opposed to just driving into traffic away from a real-estate broker on foot), they also killed a man in a bar parking lot. But aside from this old-school take, the Daily News coverage of the string of apartment robberies is quite forward-thinking! They downloaded a picture of Jennifer Jones, one of the accused thieves, from Facebook.com. And she's doing yoga, no less! Now, the News clearly isn't one of Jennifer's 73 friends — otherwise you can imagine all of the Vampire applications they'd be using on her ("Start biting chumps!") — so we can't be sure whether the flexible woman in question is, in fact, a robber. But ever since Virginia Tech, when message boards on Facebook were often the only accurate listings of the missing and wounded, have you noticed that the Website has been adopted as an acceptable, reliable way for news outlets to research young people? Interesting, huh? Also interesting: the fact that Jennifer Jones is 33, and therefore way too old to be on Facebook in the first place.
Two women arrested for posing as apt. buyers, then swiping luxury goods [NYDN]

East Village: Looks like a haute-Jell-O-shot movement might be jiggling into town; Detour used to feature a seasonal special, and now avant-garde recipes like this one, which combines apple, bourbon, and bacon, are popping up. [Mouthing Off/Food&Wine]
Hell’s Kitchen: If you want to share a dessert with a pal at Kyotofu, expect to pay a $5 toll, per person. [Bottomless Dish/Citysearch]
Midtown East: Alto did not disappoint Bruni like so many other fine restaurants, who’ve concluded many a meal by serving an even amount of petits fours to his odd-numbered party: “This is not a give-me-more-food complaint. This is a who’s-doing-the-arithmetic expression of befuddlement.” [Diner’s Journal/NYT]
Upper East Side: Park Avenue Autumn will begin its winter transformations on November 27, and VIPs will get to taste the menu and see a sneak peek of the décor on that same night. [Zagat]
West Village: There’s still time to book a Thanksgiving table, and now Anne Burrell has designed a special menu for Centro Vinoteca that includes brined-herb-crusted-turkey with polenta corn bread. [NYM]

Chelsea: The old Bright Food Shop space will be replaced by Tommy’s Mexican Grill, seemingly from the owners of Tello’s, Mare, and Casa Havana, the latter of which is set to replace Havana Chelsea. [Blog Chelsea]
Clinton Hill: Gnarly Vines boutique wine store has opened and is offering a promotional discount of 15 percent off full and mixed cases. [Clinton Hill Blog]
Lower East Side: Thor’s third executive chef (after Kurt Gutenbrunner and Kevin Pomplun), Mark Spangenthal, has now abandoned the restaurant after realizing “that this marriage wasn’t going to work.” [Eater]
Tribeca: One conjecture on De Niro’s source for the thousands of corks that protrude from Ago’s ceiling: They were acquired “from a branch of the Canadian girls scouts that collected and sold them for charity.” [Down by the Hipster]
Upper East Side: The French Institute will host a Beaujolais Nouveau tasting party on November 15 in their new skyroom at 22 East 60th Street. [Zagat] The Pierre hotel will close at the end of December for an entire year during a $100 million renovation that includes revamping Cafe Pierre and its bar. [NewYorkology]

Chelsea: New promo pics for the too-fabulous Yves (so French!) condo tell a smoldering story of love, lust, and on-site lap pools. [Curbed]
Clinton Hill: Don't click here unless you're ready to see the dead, mutilated squirrel left in front of the home of this blogger. Revenge from a developer who got a snarky write-up? [Brownstoner]
Downtown Brooklyn: The massive new real estate planned for the area may not be so massive overall...think 1.6 mil square feet of office space versus the 4.5 mil projected a few years ago. [NYO]

Flatiron: Shake Shack is hammering out a year-round plan that may kick off after the New Year and will include heat lamps. (It better!) [Eat for Victory/VV]
Long Island City: Art-O-Mat sells nice neighborhood souvenirs like LIChocolate bars. [LIC-NYC]
Lower East Side: New bar and restaurant Cafe Katja has earned some positive buzz for its touches like house-made pickles and sauerkraut and well-priced Austrian and German wine and beer. [Blog Chelsea]
Midtown West: Five Guys Burger’s and Fries at 43 West 55th Street started serving today, a day ahead of schedule. [Midtown Lunch]
Nolita: Katie Lee Joel’s favorite New York restaurant is Ballato’s on East Houston near Mulberry Street. [Restaurant Girl]
Times Square: Top-notch steakhouse Del Frisco’s still has steak tips and mashed potatoes on its lunch menu for under $10, though the burger’s over $13. [Midtown Lunch]
Upper East Side: Sassy’s Sliders at 1530 Third Avenue near 86th Street is the front-runner in this roundup of the city’s best mini-sandwiches, which also includes Burke’s burgers at Bloomingdale's and the Little Owl’s meatball version. [Gridskipper]
West Village: The new bar replacing Luke & Leroy on Seventh Avenue South is having a soft opening tonight. [Imbible/Citysearch] Voyage has finally given up the ghost, and its prime Perry Street restaurant real estate with it. [Eater]

Bay Ridge: If you see lots of nooses tonight, don't bug out and call Rev. Al. It's Halloween, people — the night when nooses are exempt from Jim Crow overtones. [Bay Ridge Rover]
Harlem: Did you know that the gargoyles on this old building tell a story about chicken soup? Check them out, 'cause they're plenty creepy-lookin' for the holiday. [The Weblicist]
Hell's Kitchen: Does the forbidding of a sax player from practicing in his apartment signal the morphing of Manhattan Plaza from an artists' enclave to a yuppie one? [NYDN]